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University of Birmingham Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere Sullivan, Erin DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2018.1439092 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Sullivan, E 2018, 'Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere: Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming', Shakespeare, vol. 14, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2018.1439092 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Shakespeare on 15th March 2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17450918.2018.1439092 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere: Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming Erin Sullivan ([email protected]) Keywords: Digital, Performance, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Royal Shakespeare Company, Public Sphere, Social Media Abstract: How has the expansion of digital culture in the twenty-first century influenced the performance of Shakespeare’s plays in and for the public sphere? This article looks at two social media adaptations produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the last decade: Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), a version of Romeo and Juliet performed for five weeks on Twitter, and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013), a month-long, hybrid staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream using Google+. Drawing on digital records, practitioner interviews, and, above all, audience members’ interactive responses to the projects, this article explores how these social media re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s plays foreground questions of time, presence, participation, and ethics in the theatre as it evolves within an ever-widening digital and public sphere. “OK so… how does this work?” —@julietcap16 In the opening lines of The Empty Space, Peter Brook famously boils the art of theatre-making down to the most basic essentials: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (9). A space, an actor, an audience—someone does something while someone else watches, and theatre is born. One of the fundamental principles of Brook’s treatise, “a holy text” according to some, is that theatre can happen anywhere (see Lan). It is not a function of a certain kind of architectural space, but of an elemental exchange taking place between people. Such an account highlights the inherently social, relational, and public nature of theatrical experience: it is something that happens with, through, for, and because of others. And yet theatre as an art form has, arguably, been reluctant at times to explore the possibilities of digital connectivity, that most social, relational, and public of phenomena in twenty-first-century life.1 Perhaps because scholars, practitioners, and audiences alike have so often emphasised the fundamental necessity of physical co-presence in the creation of live theatrical experience, the idea that this ancient art form might find new life on the virtual stage of the world wide web has struggled for acceptance among some.2 This is not to say that there haven’t been attempts to investigate what online theatre might look like, or that a number of people haven’t observed the potential affinities between digitised, plugged-in life and dramatic performance. As early as 1991, Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre highlighted the relationship between the interactive, representational worlds created by theatre and those evoked through computer programmes and interfaces. More recently, Christina Papagiannouli’s Political Cyberformance (2016) has investigated how digital culture and collaborative tools might energise politically engaged, grassroots theatrical work. Still, many theatre enthusiasts—perhaps especially within the world of more classical, text- driven Shakespearean drama—have remained ambivalent about the creative potential of digital connectivity. If it’s true that theatrical performance often remains “so analog”, as William Worthen has playfully suggested (165), then it is worth asking ourselves the question: why? This article explores what happens when theatre enters “the very public space of the Internet” (Hutcheon/O’Flynn 192) by looking at two high-profile examples of professionally scripted, acted, and, in a sense, “staged” social media adaptations of Shakespeare: Such Tweet Sorrow (2010) and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013). Co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, these projects probed the limits of theatrical experience by moving dramatic character and action into the networked world of social media communication and seeing what this new stage could offer. Such Tweet Sorrow, developed in collaboration with the digital design company Mudlark, used Twitter to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet over the course of five weeks from April to May 2010. Modernised language and contexts replaced Shakespeare’s original poetry and settings, and audience members interacted online with the seven actors performing the principal roles from different Twitter accounts. A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming at once expanded this creative focus while also taking a step back from complete digital immersion. Produced with the help of Google Creative Lab and performed over three days during the June 2013 midsummer weekend, it combined a live, “real- time” performance of the play in Stratford-upon-Avon with an online, interactive exploration of peripheral and entirely new characters on the digital platform Google+. This article considers what such collaborative experiments in digital theatre-making might mean for the future of Shakespearean performance, and more specifically for its publics. While there is no question that projects like Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming have the ability to reach wider and more diverse audiences than most traditional stage performances, what is less clear is the kinds of creative experiences such encounters produce: as we will see, their narratives are by no means predestined. In their adoption of internet idioms and online forms of representation, these projects have incurred charges of dumbing-down or thinning out Shakespeare’s language, characters, and stories. At the same time, in their parallel exploration of digital modes of interaction, they have troubled conventional understandings of the boundaries between stage and audience, of performance and “real” life. Looking more closely at these social media adaptations reveals several insights into what digital culture can do for theatre and indeed for Shakespeare: it can reframe our understanding of critical appraisal and audience authority, provide new ways into dramatic characterisation, highlight the pleasures of shared emotion and experience, and encourage us to explore the possibilities of non-linear story-telling. Perhaps most importantly, it can challenge us to think harder about theatre’s ethical relationship to society and the audience’s role in such matters, especially as the fictional looks more and more like the real. In focusing our attention on how social media performance might work, these productions push us to consider how the very nature of performance itself might be changing—both on-stage and off-—as Shakespeare and his publics evolve in response to an increasingly digital world. “To be a public spectacle to all”: audiences and exposure In writings on theatre and the public sphere, hopes and visions for the power of digital connectivity have often been high. For John Muse, the inherent “staginess” of social media platforms like Twitter is “laying the groundwork for a new theatrical avant-garde that is less centralised, less elite, and less invested than their predecessors” (53, 56). Christopher Balme has gone further, suggesting that creative uses of digital technology could help re-energise and re-politicise an increasingly esoteric and inward-looking theatrical culture: “Today, the normal performance fare, no matter how innovative, taboo-breaking